A lightning talk
is an informal very short talk, anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes.
Typically a conference will have a session of lightning talks,
where anyone can get up to plug a project, tell a story or flame about
an annoyance. Anything goes.
I'm a lightning talk junkie -- I love giving them, and I
love hearing what everyone else has to say.

I had some simple slides for this particular talk. Generally I've
used bold or other set-offs to indicate terms I showed on a slide.

SCALE 8x, by
the way, is awesome so far, and I'm looking forward to the next two days.

Grub2 3-minute lightning talk

What's a grub? A soft wriggly worm.

But it's also the Ubuntu Bootloader.
And in Karmic, we have a brand new grub: grub2!

Well, sort of. Karmic uses Grub 2 version 1.97 beta4.
Aside from the fact that it's a beta -- nuff said about that --
what's this business of grub TWO being version ONE point something?
Are you hearing alarm bells go off yet?

But it must be better, right?
Like, they say it cleans up partition numbering.

Yay! So that confusing syntax in grub1, where you have to say [SLIDE]
(hd0,0) that doesn't look like anything else on Linux,
and you're always wanting to put the parenthesis in the wrong place
-- they finally fixed that?

Well, no. Now it looks like this: (hd0,1)
THEY KEPT THE CONFUSING SYNTAX BUT CHANGED THE NUMBER!
Gee, guys, thanks for making things simpler!

But at least grub2 is better at graphics, right? Like what if
you want to add a background image under that boring boot screen?
A dark image, because the text is white.

Except now Ubuntu changes the text color to black.
So you look in the config file to find out why ...

if background_image `make_system_path_relative...
set color_normal=black/black

... there it is! But why are there two blacks?
Of course, there's no documentation. They can't be fg/bg --
black on black wouldn't make any sense, right?

Well, it turns out it DOES mean foreground and background -- but the second
"black" doesn't mean black. It's a special grub2 code for "transparent".
That's right, they wrote this brand new program from scratch, but they
couldn't make a parser that understands "none" or "transparent".

What if you actually want text with a black background? I have
no idea. I guess you're out of luck.

Okay, what about dual booting? grub's great at that, right?
I have three distros installed on this laptop. There's a shared /boot
partition. When I change something, all I have to do is edit a file
in /boot/grub. It's great -- so much better than lilo! Anybody remember
what a pain lilo was?

#
# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE
#
# It is automatically generated by /usr/sbin/grub-mkconfig using templates
# from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub
#

Oops, wait -- not with grub2. Now I'm not supposed to edit
that file. Instead, I edit files in TWO places,
/etc/grub.d and /etc/default/grub.conf, and then
run a program in a third place, /usr/bin/update-grub.
All this has to be done from the same machine where you installed
grub2 -- if you're booted into one of your other distros, you're out
of luck.

grub2 takes us back to the bad old days of lilo. FAIL

Grub2 really is a soft slimy worm after all.

But I have some ideas for workarounds. If you care, watch my next
few articles on LinuxPlanet.com.